New paper from my colleague and friend Julio Cauhy, reconstructing extreme rainfall events in Southern Brazil over the past 7.5 ka. Julio and colleagues combined cave monitoring with painstaking petrography and careful U-Th dating to analyse detrital flood layers in speleothems from Malfazido cave. They found that extreme rainfall events are influenced by Antarctic-tropical teleconnections, and that El Nino events had an important contribution in the last millennium. It's a fantastic piece of work!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03506-y

#QuaternaryScience #palaeoscience #palaeoclimatology #speleothem #CaveScience #Brazil #ExtremeRainfallEvents

A who's who of Australian palynologists and palaeoecologists present this recent paper in Science, finding that colonisation has affected fire regimes in Australia by causing greater shrub density.

Comprehensive, and I love to see colleagues and friends get a "big" paper in the bag!

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn8668

#wildfire @paleofire #palaeoscience #AusQuaternary

Australasian quaternarists will be happy to see that the call for abstracts for #AQUA2024 has been opened! AQUA is also offering student travel awards - all the details are slowly emerging on both the website and the mailing list.

https://aqua.org.au/conference/aqua-2024/

#AusQuaternary #conference #CallForAbstracts #Quaternary #palaeoscience

Someone has kindly included me in an email chain about a pollen library. Very generous. And yet, one of my career aspirations is to NEVER have to spend time staring at pollen down a microscope. How does one say that politely?!

#pollen #palynology #microscopy #palaeoscience #palaeoenvironment

FYI Australasian quaternarists, there is AQUA news!

1. Membership is due (we run on the calendar year) - join or renew here: https://aqua.org.au/membership/become-an-aqua-member/

2. The AGM is coming up! If you have some ideas about how AQUA should be run, consider joining the executive - it's a friendly bunch. To stay abrest, join the mailing list: https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/aqualist

#AusQuaternary #Quaternary #palaeoscience #EarthScience

So happy to be part of the AQUA community. Our first committee meeting of the year today, and plenty of good things coming up. It's really wonderful to serve on a committee that cares so much about DEI and supporting ECRs. If you're in #Australasia and into #Quaternary things, join us! https://aqua.org.au/

#EarthScience #Geography #Geology #palaeoscience